42 
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
the other men over whom they are placed and for whom 
they should work. 
My host and hostess, Sir Alfred and Lady Pease, were 
on the best terms with all their neighbors, and their friendly 
interest was returned; now it was the wife of a Boer farmer 
who sent over a basket of flowers, now came a box of 
apples from an English settler on the hills; now Prinsloo 
the Boer stopped to dinner; now the McMillans—Ameri¬ 
can friends, of whose farm and my stay thereon I shall 
speak later—rode over from their house on the Mua Hills, 
with their guest, Selous, to take lunch. This, by the way, 
was after I had shot my first lions, and I was much pleased 
to be able to show Selous the trophies. 
My gentle-voiced hostess and her daughter had seen 
many strange lands and strange happenings; as was nat¬ 
ural with a husband and father of such adventure-loving 
nature. They took a keen interest, untinged by the slightest 
nervousness, in every kind of wild creature from lions and 
leopards down. The game was in sight from the veranda 
of the house almost every hour of the day. Early one morn¬ 
ing, in the mist, three hartebeests came right up to the 
wire fence, two score yards from the house itself; and the 
black-and-white striped zebra, and ruddy hartebeest, grazed 
or rested through the long afternoons in plain view, on the 
hillsides opposite. 
It is hard for one who has not himself seen it to realize 
the immense quantities of game to be found on the Kapiti 
Plains and Athi Plains and the hills that bound them. 
The common game of the plains, the animals of which I 
saw most while at Kitanga and in the neighborhood, were 
the zebra, wildebeest, hartebeest, Grant’s gazelle, and 
